Summary
¦ bisTrack processes 1,500 sales transactions a month at RIdgeons’ Forest Products Division.
¦ Smart Views provides snapshots of data in the system.
¦ The software also simplifies chain of custody audits.
¦ The system gives total stock visibility.
Progressive Solutions’ bisTrack software was first implemented three years ago at Ridgeons’ Forest Products Division during the early stages of a 12-month exercise. This has culminated in 600 users across the Ridgeons group using the system to manage every aspect of its operation.
Around 25,000m³ of timber moves through the division’s Suffolk site every year. Seventy per cent of sales are to branches within the Ridgeons group, and bisTrack processes 1,500 or so sales transactions for the division every month.
One of the responsibilities of the division’s new general manager, Jem Slee, is to ensure a return on the group’s investment in IT and he says that the Microsoft Windows-based bisTrack has already delivered huge efficiencies through time and cost savings.
Mr Slee uses Smart Views (bisTrack’s standard or customisable snapshots of pertinent data in the system) to access live sales and margin information, which he can export to Excel for manipulation and reporting. Smart Views save time, as the user doesn’t need to go to separate sources in the system for the information. Office manager Annette Wait also uses them to pick up irregularities in order inputting, pricing, stock receipting and EDI documents, so she can track these documents back and rectify them.
Better customer service
Basic functionality, such as being able to copy from Word or Excel into orders and quotes, and having more than one Window open so you can move quickly from quote to sale when talking to a customer, helps the team to work faster and provide better customer service.
Sales development manager Stephan Wait is another Smart Views fan and to help develop sales to external customers he has created a view that shows the ‘daily order intake’ for sales outside of the group. “We can already see orders coming through the system but I wanted something which showed this more specific activity on a daily basis and which gives us a better feel for the level of external business coming in each day and over the month,” said Mr Wait.
“We have a lot more transparency now through ‘related documents’ which is very powerful. Just being able to find work quickly on the system, through the order monitor, where we can review margins and see sales that have gone through, is so much better.”
Purchasing process
In the purchasing department, Peter Wittish said that day-to-day purchasing is much easier now because of the way the software allows the user to break down product information.
“We can look at products by size, grade, length, individual pack number, which mill supplied the product, stock that is on order, stock that is allocated and the stock location of each pack,” he said. “This helps immensely in reducing the time wasted looking for certain packs to machine or order pick in a large yard.
“The ability to produce reports in relation to purchase/product analysis is significantly faster than previously, and they can be broken down over any period from one month up to multiple years for each individual product code,” he continued. “This process really helps us with the forecasting of volumes required.
“We can also set minimum and maximum stock levels to trigger purchase orders automatically, which is a great help as we have so many product lines to keep track of,” Mr Wittish added. “There are other simple but time-saving benefits too, such as being able to raise a purchase order and email it. Before we had to print it and fax it – or just write it out by hand.”
The software is also making Ridgeons’ chain of custody audits much easier. Because the company runs a ‘volume credit’ system, all volumes, in and out, of all products, have to be recorded. Using bisTrack, these reports can be run by certification scheme, by size, by grade, by group or even by branch, which was not possible with the old system. If the auditor requests a report to prove that the chain of custody hasn’t been broken, Ridgeons can now identify and retrieve all relevant information, from the point where the request was made for a certified product on the purchase order, to the scanned goods in tickets, the stock receipt, and the date the product was machined or sold as a sawn product.
Escaping a black hole
Divisional operations manager Paul Mazey said that bisTrack has enabled the group to move away from what he described as the black hole principle of timber management.
“Historically this was the way the timber trade worked,” he said. “You had to make sure you had a lot of everything so the salesmen could sell whatever they wanted, and then the operations team would just take what they had and cut and convert it to meet the order. But, with no visibility or control over the processes in the middle, you were never really sure if you were making any money until the end.
“Our previous system gave us some sort of real-time stock control but we still had this black hole of processes in the middle. Then bisTrack arrived, and gave us total visibility. We know exactly what stock is there, we know what lengths we’ve got, you can put in the processes, you can take account of the offcuts, and you can see exactly what your costs are. We’ve gone from a lot of guesswork into being very precise – and that is a big change.”
